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Managed IT & Support

Internet for remote WA sites: satellite, 4G and fixed options compared

nbn fixed wireless, Sky Muster, LEO satellite, 4G and 5G, microwave and fibre for WA mine sites, farms and regional offices, and why two links beat one.

Geidi Infrastructure Team7 min read

In brief

What it is
A comparison of nbn fixed wireless, Sky Muster, LEO satellite, 4G and 5G, microwave and fibre for remote WA sites.
Who it affects
WA mine sites, camps, farms and regional offices whose work depends on a hard-to-get connection.
What to do
Survey the site before you buy, keep safety systems working offline, and plan for two links rather than one.
On this page
  1. The realistic options
  2. Why one link is never enough
  3. Practical steps
  4. Where Geidi fits
  5. Sources

Picture a site office four hours from Perth where the internet drops most afternoons, and staff have learnt to save their work before it does. Head office rarely believes how bad it is until someone visits.

For a lot of Western Australian organisations, that's simply how it is. Mine sites and camps, farms, and offices in the Pilbara, Goldfields and Kimberley all need the same systems as the city. The difference is that the connection is harder to get, harder to fix, and usually the one thing everything else depends on.

There's no one best option. Each technology is good at something and bad at something else, and the right answer for most remote sites is two of them working together.

The realistic options

Figures below are taken from each provider's own pages as of October 2026. They are wholesale or typical speeds, not promises, and what you actually get depends on your plan, your location and the time of day.

nbn Fixed Wireless

Fixed Wireless sends the signal by radio from an nbn tower to an outdoor antenna on your building, so it needs a clear line of sight to the tower. nbn says it reaches around 800,000 premises and has been upgraded with 4G and 5G equipment, extending tower range from 14 km to up to 29 km where possible. WA is on its list of upgrade areas.

After the upgrade, Fixed Wireless Plus runs at wholesale speeds of up to 100/20 Mbps, and in select locations Fixed Wireless Home Fast (200 to 250 Mbps down) and Superfast (400 Mbps down) are available. Some older antennas need replacing to get the higher speeds.

It suits a fixed office or homestead in range of a tower. Expect slower speeds in nbn's evening busy period, 7pm to 11pm.

nbn Sky Muster satellite

Sky Muster covers the places nothing else reaches, across mainland Australia and remote islands. The current Sky Muster Plus Premium plans have uncapped data, and the high-tier plan has a maximum wholesale speed of 100/5 Mbps, with nbn quoting a typical busy period download speed of 63 Mbps.

Two things matter for a business. First, nbn itself warns that satellite users may experience latency: the signal makes a long trip up and back, which video calls and remote desktop sessions feel. Second, read the fair use rules. Uncapped doesn't mean unshaped: nbn says a fair use policy and shaping apply, VPN traffic is among the activity it may shape, and its examples of unfair use include downloading software updates for more than 20 devices. That's a site office on patch day.

If you were on nbn's Business Satellite Service, note that nbn discontinued it on 31 December 2025.

Low earth orbit (LEO) satellite

LEO satellites orbit much closer to the earth than Sky Muster, which is why latency is far lower. Starlink is the best known service in Australia. Its own specifications quote latency under 50 ms on its service plans, typical download speeds between 45 and 280 Mbps and uploads between 10 and 30 Mbps, as of October 2026. Starlink also lists the dish's field of view and weather among the things that affect performance, so trees, buildings and placement matter.

nbn has signed a contract with Amazon to offer a LEO satellite service through Amazon Leo in its satellite footprint. When and what that looks like is up to nbn, so check before you plan around it.

It suits sites with no fixed option and sites that move, as long as the dish has a clear view of the sky.

Mobile 4G and 5G with an external antenna

Where there's mobile coverage, a business-grade router with a roof or mast antenna is often the quickest thing to install. Telstra, Optus and Vodafone all publish coverage maps, and the federal Mobile Black Spot Program has activated 1,210 new base stations around Australia as at 31 August 2026, so check the maps again even if you looked a few years ago.

The catch is capacity. A tower serving a town, a highway and a camp of several hundred people gets busy, and speeds drop when everyone finishes their shift. In the Pilbara in particular, 4G towers are often overloaded.

One legal point: mobile phone boosters are illegal in Australia, according to the ACMA. A cellular repeater is only legal if your telco has authorised it. An external antenna on a proper router is a different thing, but if someone offers you a "signal booster", ask which it is.

Microwave and point-to-point links

A licensed or unlicensed radio link can carry a connection several kilometres from somewhere with good internet (a town, a tower, a fibre point) to your site, or between buildings on a large site. It needs line of sight, a mast at each end and someone who knows radio planning. Done well it's fast and low latency. Planned badly, it's the link that drops out in a storm.

Business fibre

If fibre reaches your town or your lease, it's the most reliable option by a distance, and business fibre services tend to come with the firmest service levels. In much of remote WA it simply isn't there, or the build cost is large. Ask anyway: the federal Regional Connectivity Program has awarded funding to up to 298 local projects across three rounds, including fibre, fixed wireless and microwave backhaul, so the answer changes over time.

Every option above fails in its own way. A tower goes down, a dish gets dusty, a cyclone takes out power at the hub, a grader cuts a cable. If the site has one connection, every one of those failures stops work.

The fix is two links that fail for different reasons, such as fixed wireless plus LEO satellite, joined by an SD-WAN router or firewall. SD-WAN watches both links and moves traffic to the healthy one automatically, and can send voice calls and business systems over the better link while big downloads wait.

Two satellite services from the same sky aren't much diversity. Two links from the same mobile tower aren't either.

Practical steps

  1. Survey the site before you buy anything. Check nbn's address checker, the telcos' coverage maps and the Mobile Black Spot and Regional Connectivity Program maps, then test on the ground with real equipment, at the times people actually work.
  2. Decide what must keep working offline. Safety systems, gate access, radios and local cameras shouldn't depend on the internet at all. Know which cloud systems can wait an hour and which can't.
  3. Plan your updates. Schedule Windows and app updates outside peak hours, and use local caching where you can, especially on metered or fair use plans.
  4. Keep the power on. Put the routers, antenna equipment and switches on a UPS, or the backup link dies with the mains.
  5. Secure the remote links. Routers, firewalls and VPN gateways are the devices attackers look at first. The ACSC's guidance on edge devices says to patch them promptly, use phishing-resistant MFA, keep management interfaces off the internet and replace devices that have reached end of life. Our patching timelines article covers how fast is fast enough.
  6. Monitor it. You want to know a site link has failed over before the site manager rings.

Where Geidi fits

Remote access and VPN, SD-WAN, and VoIP and connectivity are part of Geidi's managed IT support, with a 7-day service desk. Geidi is a Perth-based IT services provider operating since 2000, and has developed internet solutions for mining contractors with mobile sites in the Pilbara. See how we work with mining companies and contractors, or get in touch to talk about a site.

Sources

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